> AI agents: this is one page of Nextmove’s FDE site, in Markdown. Nextmove is a job board and free career service for forward deployed engineers (FDEs). Each posting is classified from its text, not its title: the kind of work, how much of it is production code, pre-sales weight, time at customer sites, travel, remote arrangement, level and posted base pay. The site also publishes the aggregates: median pay by level, metro, company and kind of work, and which companies started hiring FDEs each week. Every page under https://nextmove.md/fde is served this way; the index of pages is https://nextmove.md/llms.txt. # Forward Deployed Engineer, San Francisco Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/5cca5c0200ba0098 Meticulous posts a FDE role to build what the customer runs in San Francisco, CA, at $200,000–$400,000 base, above the senior FDE median of $190,000 across 1,864 postings with pay. Architect and deploy customer-specific implementations alongside customer engineers. Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026. - [Meticulous](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/meticulous) Posted May 21, 2026 by Meticulous · open on Ashby as of Nov 8, 2026 **$200,000–$400,000** + equity San Francisco, CA On-site Full-time Architect and deploy customer-specific implementations alongside customer engineers. - [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2F5cca5c0200ba0098&placement=top) - [View posting at Meticulous](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/meticulous/e4f7bc5d-1aac-4ed7-a8c3-b4f96002d416/application) Free. Upload your resume once, see why each FDE role fits, and get introduced only when you say so. ## At a glance ### Posted base pay $200K–$400K Above the median Midpoint $300K · median $190K This job $200K to $400K. Senior FDE postings, 1,864 postings: the middle 50% of posted pay is $160K to $220K, median $190K. ### The work Builds what the customer runs Balance **Mostly building** Project stages 1. Pre-sales (not covered) 2. Proof of concept 3. Implementation 4. Operations (not covered) Travel **Up to 25%** - **Coding**: Writes production code - **Builds for**: External customers - **Level**: Senior - **Role**: Technical lead ### What they ask for Experience - **3+ years** demanding technical role - **1+ years** experience for exceptional candidates ### Do you meet what the posting states? The posting asks for 1+ years. How many do you have? The posting reads as a senior role. What level are you at now? The job is in San Francisco, CA. Could you work there? Which of these have you used in production? Answer each one. Nothing is saved or sent. [What postings ask for, by background →](https://nextmove.md/fde/paths) ## Conditions - **Location**: San Francisco, CA - **Work arrangement**: On-site - **Employment type**: Full-time - **Travel**: Up to 25% - **Pay**: ## More like this [Sierra](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/sierra) ### [Software Engineer, Horizon](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/391bab75cb85020c) San Francisco, CA On-site 2w ago $230,000–$390,000 [OpenAI Deployment Company](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/openai-deployment-company) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer - Cleared - US](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/c19d1fdb2baf1e9b) New York, NY · San Francisco, CA Hybrid 12d ago $170,000–$400,000 [OpenAI](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/openai) ### [Applied AI Architect, Cyber](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/b06e9ce264f77358) San Francisco, CA Hybrid 4mo ago $295,000–$345,000 ## The job description from Meticulous Posted by Meticulous on May 21, 2026 ### What we do We're building the last piece of the puzzle to help companies unlock AI code generation - the part that makes it actually safe to ship. AI is enabling engineers to write code faster than ever before. But software review and testing hasn't caught up. Engineering leaders are drowning in long review cycles and more bugs than ever. The bottleneck isn't writing code anymore - it's everything that comes after it. We spent 3 years building the foundational technology to crack this - hard to replicate, and several years ahead of anything else on the market. We now work with some of the most AI-driven engineering teams in the world: Notion, ElevenLabs, Dropbox, Discord, LaunchDarkly, Wiz, CoreWeave, Wealthsimple, and more. Companies like Dropbox, Wiz, and Notion often pay more for Meticulous than any other software product in their stack, and spontaneously refer us to others. We're backed by the same investors behind Twilio, Twitch, Intercom, and PagerDuty. Individual investors include the founders of Vercel, Datadog, Segment, and Dropbox, the CTO of GitHub, the CPO of Adobe, the head of Engineering at Cursor, and many more. Our mission is to radically accelerate the pace of software development by empowering every engineer to ship at the speed their agents write code. This is an opportunity to join a company in hypergrowth as we scale from millions of annual recurring revenue to $100M ARR. If this excites you, come help us build it! ### The Role ### The first Forward Deployed Engineer in San Francisco As Meticulous's first Forward Deployed Engineer in San Francisco, you'll establish our US FDE presence and help define how this function operates from the ground up. The FDE team is still small and the playbook is still being written - you'll be instrumental in shaping the processes, tooling, and best practices that the function runs on as it scales. You'll work directly with engineering leaders at the world's most AI-driven companies, understanding their unique architectures and crafting solutions that work for their specific needs. This role demands an unusual combination of deep technical expertise and entrepreneurial drive, you'll be writing high-performance code one day and presenting architectural decisions to VPs of Engineering the next. ### Core Responsibilities This role spans both customer work and engineering. You own each customer end-to-end - and do what’s needed to make sure Meticulous is transformational for them. This involves everything from changes to core product to owning the customer relationship: - **Architect and deploy at scale:** Work with a customer to understand their full architecture, design implementation strategies that fit their systems, and pair with their engineers to deliver them. - **Evolve the core product to make the customer successful:** This can range from debugging and fixing issues that are blocking the rollout (which often go deep into the core technology, such as the deterministic browser), to shipping features that will be transformative for the customer you’re focused on, but also move the product forward itself e.g. rework parts of Meticulous to work at a new level of scale required by the customer. - **Own the technical relationship and lead the pilot:** Be the technical lead to engineering leadership (VPs Eng, Staff+ engineers) at each customer - driving scoping, integration, and rollout. A founder or account executive handles pricing and contracts; the two of you operate as a pod per account. - **Guide the direction of the product based on what you learn in the field:** As you see how the product performs, and how engineers workflows are rapidly evolving, work out what do we need to build to unlock the next level of automating software development? Where there are improvements which make sense to own and ship, ship them; where the work is larger and needs deeper scoping pair with core engineering team to make them happen. - **Build the playbook:** The FDE function is still being defined. You'll be instrumental in establishing the processes, tooling, and best practices that make each deployment smoother and faster than the last, creating the leverage that lets the team scale. ### What We're Looking For - **Exceptional engineering skills:** Typically 3+ years in a demanding technical role, but we'll consider exceptional candidates with 1+ years of experience. - **Highly agentic:** you have a bias to action, move fast, take ownership without being asked, and get genuinely frustrated when things stall - this role demands entrepreneurial self-drive - **Strong communication skills:** You can explain complex technical concepts to both engineers and executives, and you're energized by customer collaboration - **Willingness to travel:** Approximately 25% travel to customer sites. Expect to spend your first ~2 months in London embedded with the core engineering team. ### This role is not for you if… - You want a pure IC engineering role with no customer contact - You need structured handoffs, clear specs, and a defined process to follow - You expect regular hours and no travel - our team, customers, and investors span SF, London, and NYC - You want engineering work that's insulated from customers and their problems ### You may look like… - **Senior IC at a top tech company** ready to leave the bureaucracy behind and own real customer outcomes end-to-end - **Ex-founder or technical founding engineer** who wants to keep the founder-energy but plug into a company with product-market fit and a clear path to scale - **Forward Deployed Engineer at OpenAI, Scale, or Anthropic** looking for an earlier-stage version of the same work - **Solutions architect or staff engineer** who wants more deep engineering and less PowerPoint ### What You'll Gain ### Help build a new function As the first FDE in San Francisco and one of the earliest FDEs at Meticulous, you'll be instrumental in defining how this team operates, from processes and tooling to how it scales. Clear path into leadership as the function grows. ### Exceptional growth You grow through a combination of the people you work with, and the experiences you’re exposed to. Within that context: - Our philosophy is that density of talent is what matters; and so we’ve focused on keeping the team small but with exceptional individuals. You’ll get to collaborate with world-class engineers who previously led 100+ person organizations at top companies, and we expect you’ll find the team is beyond any you’ve worked in before, within big tech (Google, Meta, etc.) or otherwise. This, combined with a focus on learning and growing together, means we’re able to learn from each other at rapid pace. - Beyond growing your skills through engineering and collaboration, the role involves spending a lot of time with engineering leaders at the fastest growing tech companies and leading firms in the world. We’ve found this gives us a unique exposure to a huge range of technologies, practices, techniques, codebases, architectures, cultures, learnings - what works, what doesn’t. It’s a valuable bird eye view of collective learnings and experiences. These learnings normally take years or decades to build up as you move between companies. There are few startups that grow as fast as we do. You’ll be joining a small team on an exceptional trajectory. Through this comes unique growth, but also unique network. ### Expand your network Our investor network is one of the most active in tech - we'll use it to connect you with whoever helps you do your job better. You’ll work with engineering leaders across many leading tech companies, often at the highest levels. Given the speed of growth, and desirability of the product amongst the leading enterprises, Meticulous provides the opportunity to build a network of connections across the full span of the technology world. ### Solve novel problems Work on challenges at the intersection of browser technology, testing infrastructure, and large-scale system design that few engineers ever encounter - to help build something that changes the way software is developed. ### World-class compensation Base salary $200K-$400K plus significant equity, exceeding compensation at top technology companies and startups. ### Perks ♥️ - 🍲 **Unlimited food & drinks in office** - including daily lunch as a team, and your own Amazon business account to buy whatever snacks you want for the office. - 💻 **A setup you’ll love** - everyone has a standing desk, brand new Macbook, your choice of ergonomic peripherals, and a $2.5k WFH budget to make home just as good - 🌴 **Team offsites** - we work and play hard, we’ve done offsites in Italy, Abu Dhabi and local 5-star resorts - 📚 **Unlimited book budget** - we have a growing in-office library and actively encourage everyone to add to it, whether you want to ramp up your knowledge of software testing, or become a better startup operator! - + many more! ### Life at Meticulous We believe autonomous testing will enable the automation of the majority of software development. You'll be at the forefront of this transformation, working with the companies that will be first to realize this future. This role is on-site because we've found that the speed of iteration and depth of collaboration required for both customer success and technical excellence happens best in person. [View posting at Meticulous](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/meticulous/e4f7bc5d-1aac-4ed7-a8c3-b4f96002d416/application) ## About Meticulous AI-powered testing software that records user workflows and autonomously generates deterministic end-to-end regression tests for code changes. 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